WoWWiki states..."Aggro is understood to be the condition of a particular mob attacking a particular character", others use it as an abbreviation for "aggressiveness". I like to think of it as "aggravation", and I've got plenty of that...

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Hunter Techniques for Sartharion and Gluth

In a comment discussion following a post on BRK's site, there was a hunter asking for some help on learning how to play hunter in two specific encounters: Pet Survival against Sartharion, and kiting Zombie Chow on Gluth.

Well, to be fair, given the context of his question, I think he's looking for some help with a variety of bosses, but only specifically itemized these two, and he was looking for video footage, which I don't have.

That said, I figured I'd give my Hunter techniques some air time regarding the two fights in question.

Pet Survival in Obsidian Sanctum

Pet survival in Obsidian Sanctum with drakes up is pretty brutal. However, even a Survival hunter gets 15-20% of the total DPS from the pet, so we all want to pay attention to it.

I have found some keys to keeping my pet alive when fighting Sartharion:

Run away, little girl! Run away!

Condition the stimulus response.

Stimulus: Ears hear "run away little girl".

Response: Recall pet and locate safe spot in flame wall.

Even with full Avoidance and Resistances, I have found no way for my pets to survive a flame wall hit. Recall pet, find safe spot in wall, watch wall pass, send pet back in, and resume pew pew.

Twilight Torment

Twilight Torment is a sneaky mechanic. You take damage as you do damage. You need to monitor your pet's health very carefully on this one and keep him by your side if need be during the Torment stage of the encounter.

TT is tough for the Hunter too, so you need to monitor your own health very closely as well. Mend pet, even the dull boring non-talented version that SV hunters have, will help your pet stay in there a bit longer, but be vewy vewy caweful.

Fissures

This one is tough. With your pet positioned behind a Drake, it can be very tough to spot fissures back there.

It is a shame when you see two or three hunter pets die simultaneously when a fissure comes up in a bad spot.

The flame wall and Twilight Torment are avoidable. The Fissures must be avoided without fail by the Hunter, and do your best to also spot pet fissures.

Hunter Kiting adds on Gluth

This is a fun one. If you're assigned to Zombie Chow kiting duty, you will be playing a role that is entirely different than your job on every other boss in Naxx.

Bye-bye, Pew-pew. Hello, Frost Traps.

In 10-man, this is fun as hell, because you'll likely be the only person doing the job. In 25-man, still fun, but you'll need to coordinate your efforts with other players (other Hunters, and some Mages, in my experience).

The short version of the story is: Drop a frost trap and run circles around the perimeter of the frosty area, shooting at all the Zombie Chows you can see. Drop new traps whenever the cooldown is available.

Step 1- Drop Trau Trap: After you jump down from the pipe, run in a few steps and drop a Frost Trap as soon as possible. You want to get your trap cooldown ticking right away.

Step 2 - Blow the Whistle: Recall your pet (since you dismissed prior to entering the tube, yes?) and sic her on the boss. I just leave my pet chewing on Gluth to help out with the DPS efforts. I'm sure that more creative hunters can make use of their pets in kiting, but that's not me.

Step 3 - Pull Aggro: Look for Zombie Chow. They'll generally bolt straight for a healer. You need to nail them with enough damage to generate sufficient threat to keep them off your healers. I find Explosive Shot works nicely. If I have some distance between me and Chows, I'll stand still for a moment to fire an auto-shot for added threat.

Step 4 - Position for Trap Activation: Move your toon such that the Zombie Chow you just aggroed will pass over your un-triggered frost trap.

Step 5 - Round and Round We Go: Run in a circle around the perimeter of the frost trap. The Chow will basically remain stuck sorta in the middle-ish of the trap AoE, continuously turning to follow you, thus keeping himself slowed by the trap. Meantime, you run at full speed, so he never catches you.

Step 6 - Pickup Adds: Keep eyes open for additional Zombie Chows. Here is where it gets a little tricky because you use your mouse for movement to keep yourself running around the outside -BUT- you need to target the new Chows. So I usually briefly use my left hand on the keyboard for movement while I target a new chow via the mouse. It happens very quickly, so there's nearly zero interruption to the movement.

Step 8 - Other CC: Depending on how well the "round and round we go" technique is working for you, you may need to Concussive Shot and/or Wing Clip. A jump shot here or there can be added in for some style points.

Step 9 - Volley: At certain points, all the Zombies will run for Gluth. It'll be pretty noticeable because you'll think you just lost aggro on the entire pack you were kiting. Volley the hell out of them because it'd be bad for them to reach the boss.

There you go. Nine simple steps to kiting Gluth's adds. When done well, Step 5 in Naxx-10 is a sight to behold, as you'll have this nice tight pack of 6 or 8 Zombie Chows just spiraling in the middle of your frost trap.

Who's next?

I'm not claiming to be an expert on any of this stuff, but I do like sharing methods that have proven successful for me.

7 comments:

Hey amava! Nice to see some blog posts again. Still thinking about making a post for you to get up. I've done some more raiding since, so any tricky fights that are out of the ordinary would be appreciated.

One fight I got to try the other night is Malygos 10 man. I was pugging with the top guild in the server horde side so it seemed like a pretty easy fight, and I don't think its too difficult, just need proper placement of the sparks in the first phase and then pew pew after that. My questions for that fight are:

1) How do you see where sparks are coming from, for my first time in there it was really confusing trying to find these sparks that were flying all over the place, and with no DK to gather them up maly even got to eat one. That huge ass dragon is sitting in the way to see where they are coming from and then to top it off all the melee want that damn spark parked right on top of maly's hit box so it was tricky to maintain the buff while still being able to be at enough distance to pew pew.

2) How do you see those damn flying guys in phase two. I had a hell of a time looking up and trying to find them. Maybe a target macro would be in order, but I'm thinking maybe using assist would be the better solution.

Speaking of assist, I still haven't encountered a group that uses it, and I think it would be such a huge benefit for everyone to be able to just concentrate fire on one thing at a time without guessing what the target is. Any explanation of how to set it up and use it properly would be appreciated.

I've got in the habit of organizing my own raids every once in a while, still trying to figure out the interface and how to use it. I guess they assume that when your organizing raids you know it all by then.

Learned how to do 25 man KT the other night, for some reason my pet drops like a rock everytime we start up phase 2, not sure why yet. In my only KT kill so far I saw both the envoy and journey's end drop. Didn't get either as the guy with arrowsong decided he needed to upgrade to the envoy, I'm a little bitter, but hes a raider and I'm a casual so in the end it helps the guild out I guess.

One question though, how is that I, a sad little casual running around in my sad crafted purples and a few lucky drops from raids can out dps the other hunters in my raids by anywhere from 1000 to 1500 dps. I don't even know how a hunter with almost all BiS gear can do only 1500 dps, even if his pet is dead and fell asleep with his head on the keyboard he should be doing more then that. Frustrating to see good gear go to people who it won't make any difference to. Anyways, a topic for another time I guess. Guess you have to be the husband of one of the good raiders to get the good gear :D (thats right, the wives of these slacking hunters are killing the DPS charts while the husbands are slacking hardcore).

Sets the camera WAAAAYYY back which makes it almost trivial to spot the sparks. Also helps with the p2 to be able to see the flying dudes more easily without the magic bubble interfering with your vision.

Another tip is to use Disengage - in Sarth, when you've run to the gap up at the boss, it gets you back into position faster than you can run; on Gluth, it gets you well away from whatever just dazed you, at a non-dazed speed to boot.